Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1)

by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

  He pushed the lifeless form of a woman nearest the stairs with his foot. Her clothes appeared to be some kind of civil uniform. She had been dead a long time, weeks perhaps, her skin dry and gaunt against her cheeks. Part of her skull was missing. Wyatt kneeled down next to her and examined the hole. The charred edges betrayed the impact of an energy weapon.

  “This woman was shot.”

  “This guy did it,” Maya said. She kicked away a pistol from the hand of a male corpse. She had pulled on her CORE helmet, presumably to block the smell.

  Wyatt went over to the body and saw an older man with thinning blond hair and a goatee. He wore a similar uniform to the woman and had a blast wound through his left kidney. Wyatt traced the line of fire to another male, maybe early twenties, slumped against a barricaded window.

  “Some kind of firefight went down,” Maya said.

  “That’s for sure,” Wyatt said. “Everyone shooting at everyone. Total chaos.”

  “I wonder why?”

  The afternoon sun streamed through the few windows not covered by furniture. Wyatt squinted into the light. “That body against that opening looks different.”

  “That’s because he died the same way as this chica,” Laramie said. She stood up from a small, frail-looking woman clothed in canvas utilities. “See? Less decomposition. These two didn’t croak until after the others. Everyone else has a blast injury and looks like trash.”

  Sure enough, two of the seven bodies didn’t have gunshot wounds and had apparently expired more recently. Their skin had a blue-green tint indicative of active bacterial decay. Wyatt squatted next to the last woman and poked her with his Vector. She fell over with a wet thud.

  “I think they starved to death,” Wyatt said. “Tough way to go.”

  Carlos muttered a prayer in Spanish.

  Wyatt stood back and surveyed the room. Furniture and scrap metal blocked most of the windows. He saw ammo boxes stacked against the walls. Unopened ration canisters formed a pile in the far corner.

  “These people were planning to be here for a while,” he said finally. “Something must have been going on outside. They holed up in here and barricaded the door. Then ... well, at some point, they turned on each other. Why? And why would the two remaining survivors let themselves starve? There’s still food here.”

  “Suppose something else killed them.”

  “Something else, Laramie?” Wyatt mused. “Like what?”

  “Like whatever they were hiding from.”

  He started to take a deep, contemplative breath, but a whiff of death made him think better of it. “Let’s get back downstairs.”

  9

  Wyatt broke his squad into four pairs to secure the area around them. A search found more corpses and evidence of gun battles. One set of bodies in the street had been hacked apart by farming tools. Another group had barricaded themselves in a small warehouse, but the barricade hadn’t held. Wyatt got the overwhelming impression that the violence came from some sort of riot. But over what was anyone’s guess.

  Maya went to work bypassing the Town Hall computer system. As their electronics technician, she had specialized training in how to hack or circumvent practically any modern security shield. Usually, that meant opening a locked hatch or gaining navigation control of a spacecraft. In this case, she used her skills to get access to police records.

  It didn’t take long.

  “Lieutenant? I’m in.”

  With the barricades still in place, the windows didn’t permit enough light to dispel the eerie cast inside the Town Hall building. The bluish glow from the holo monitor now set strange shadows dancing in the corners. Wyatt walked up and looked over Maya’s shoulder. “You’re kidding. What was that, sixty seconds?”

  “This was nothing.” She closed her portable codebreaker tablet and stowed it in her gear. “The stuff in Sol is much tougher.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You have to be sneaky if you want to smuggle stuff around Earth transit routes. Anvil Team has eyes everywhere. Crooks get real good at hiding things.”

  “Sounds like lots of practice.”

  “Yes, sir. It was great.”

  “Why’d you apply for a transfer out here, then?”

  Maya straightened up. “Sir, I kept stalling on the promotion ladder. Command said I needed more direct-action experience. But there just aren’t that many assignments available in Sol.”

  Wyatt wanted to be running those sorts of missions, too. He stifled a frown. “Well. Let’s get through this recon together, and we’ll see what assignment we can draw next.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the meantime, great work. I don’t think I could have logged in to my own system that fast.”

  “Well ... no comment, Lieutenant.”

  Wyatt arched an eyebrow. “Huh. You’ll fit right in.”

  Maya chuckled and left him at the console.

  Wyatt spent several hours looking through records and attempting to piece together recent events. He didn’t find much. Crop surveys, shipping manifests, and occasional arrests for public intoxication dominated the filing system. The town of Parrell was indeed a sleepy frontier community. Whatever had led to ransacked streets and defensive barricades had occurred too quickly for government documentation.

  As afternoon approached, Wyatt shelved his frustration and ordered the platoon to make camp. Teo moved the Javelin to within a hundred meters of the town perimeter. Izzy and Maya drew the first security rotation. When the sun went down, the squad would hole up in the Javelin, clear of the town and in a defensible vehicle. No one wanted to sleep in buildings with dead bodies in them.

  The horizon turned faint orange. Wyatt sat outside on the wheel well of a wrecked trailer and watched Alpha A slide toward the grassy hills. His prosthetic leg was killing him. He’d expected some aching once he got back in full gravity. But the stress of the past two days had somehow jacked up every nerve where bone ended and titanium began.

  You chose to come back, he reminded himself. You chose this.

  True, but did it have to hurt like hell?

  Laramie wandered toward him, digging a spoon in a plastic meal pouch. She sat down next to him without a word.

  “No witty banter tonight, Staff Sergeant?”

  “No.”

  Wyatt turned toward her. Her dirty-blonde hair hung to her jawline, framing a face that would have been pretty with a little bit of attention. But all Wyatt could see was a woman in troubled thought.

  “Something on your mind? Spill it.”

  Laramie stared at the ground, a frown wrinkling her forehead. She poked through the meal pouch again. Wyatt noticed she wasn’t eating any of it.

  “It’s been forever since I’ve been back home. Not exactly the homecoming I expected.”

  “Yeah. I wonder if Beck suspected something.”

  “I mean, an interdiction by a RESIT attack ship? Towns full of dead bodies? What happened here, Wyatt?”

  “I guess that’s our mission to find out, isn’t it?”

  Laramie didn’t answer. She took a tentative bite from her spoon.

  Wyatt watched her not eat. “Where down here are you from again?”

  “West Hadensville. Farm community on the other side of Venice. Like this place, only bigger.”

  A light breeze blew a torn magazine cover by with a crinkling sound, mixing with the music of unfamiliar insects.

  “I mean ... what if ...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Hey.” Wyatt swatted her arm. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Worry. About family, friends, whatever. You don’t know what’s happened. Don’t let your head get ahead of itself.”

  “How can I not? I mean, look at this place. There are corpses everywhere, huddled inside buildings like they’re hiding from the freaking bogeyman. What if it’s not just here?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “You don’t control that. Your job is to make this squad function so we can complete
our mission.”

  Laramie let the meal pouch sink to her lap and stared at the ground. For an ultra-athletic girl who never missed a meal, it was an obvious sign of her distress.

  “Look,” Wyatt said. “I know Juliet is your home. But you’ve got to put that aside. We don’t know what happened. We don’t know if other settlements look like this. So don’t go there.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sitting here bleating like a sheep. Not very professional of me.”

  Wyatt blinked. “Juliet has sheep?”

  A tiny smirk appeared on Laramie’s face. Then her eyes darted past Wyatt’s shoulder and her face turned all business. “What is it, Maya?”

  Two troopers approached with soft bootsteps crunching against the street. “Staff Sergeant, Corpsman Isi and I were walking the perimeter, and—well, we saw this big flock of birds circling over the west edge of town. They looked like vultures or something. We thought it might mean fresh dead.”

  Wyatt cleared his throat and looked at Laramie. “Juliet has vultures?”

  “Not ... birds,” she said simply.

  “Then what did they see?”

  “Probably karks. Big flying snakes. Carrion feeders.”

  “Flying snakes.”

  She gave him a shrug. “Basically. But we can call them vultures if it makes you feel better.”

  Wyatt arched an eyebrow. It was one thing to joke about the differences between Earth and Juliet. It was another thing to see it.

  Laramie shielded her eyes against the sun. “We’ve got a good hour of daylight left. Let’s go check it out.”

  “Yeah, let’s.” Wyatt stood up and hit his comm. “Gavin, this is Wyatt, over.”

  “Copy, Lieutenant.”

  “Laramie and I are heading with the perimeter team to scout out a bunch of ... vultures circling. You’re holding the fort down till we get back.”

  “Roger that.”

  Wyatt and Laramie grabbed their Vectors. After several blocks, Wyatt heard strange croaking sounds echoing off the walls of the container buildings. Black shapes with outstretched wings floated overhead, circling lazily over something a hundred meters away.

  He pointed. “There.”

  “Yep,” Laramie said. “Karks. Let’s keep going.”

  They proceeded down the street in silence, hemmed in on either side by the abandoned hulks of more containers. Wyatt scanned dark entrances and empty windows as he tried to put aside the alien vibe of Juliet. Laramie patrolled to his right. They had been friends for years, but the differences in their backgrounds felt suddenly very stark. Earth versus Juliet. City versus country. Vultures versus karks. Two human beings from completely different worlds—literally—forcing even a common vocabulary to take on new meaning.

  Maya had point several meters ahead of them and kept track of the vultures’ location as they moved. Each street ended with a T-intersection, forcing them to shift their path each time they completed a block. Wyatt began to feel disoriented after the fifth or sixth dogleg.

  “Where did you all learn your city planning?” he asked. “There isn’t a straight line in this whole town.”

  “It’s on purpose, LT.”

  “Why?”

  “This is a frontier town on a big, rolling plain. If you have unobstructed lines, you’re going to get blown over by the wind. It’s better to make the town act as its own windbreak.”

  “Huh.” Wyatt supposed that made sense, but still, it just felt like being a rat in a maze.

  “This place isn’t much different from my hometown,” Laramie added after a few moments. “We’re in the residential areas now. All the business and government is behind us.”

  “You’re a farm girl, Staff Sergeant?” Izzy asked.

  “Farm girl, ranch girl. Country girl.” Laramie’s eyes didn’t miss a beat as she scanned for threats. “There’s a lot of that here on Juliet.”

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant. Probably not as deserted as this, though?”

  A beat of silence. “No.”

  The street widened into a four-way intersection with a roundabout. A breeze kicked up dust from the street. Wyatt caught the sickly-sweet stench of flesh rotting.

  A flock of karks milled about the clearing, chewing and hissing. Two coiled around a human corpse and croaked at each other over who got the eyeball.

  “Fresh dead,” Izzy said.

  Laramie yelled at the scavengers, waving her arm in a big circle for them to leave. One of the lizards extended its wings and hissed in defiance. Laramie shot the ground near it with her Vector. Startled, the kark beat the air with a massive flap and took off.

  “That reeks,” Maya said. She pulled her CORE helmet over her face to avoid the smell.

  “Izzy, check out that body,” Wyatt said.

  The corpsman knelt down by what appeared to be a teenage boy—at least, from what was identifiable. Most of the face and part of the hands had been eaten off in a horrible, gruesome feast. The clothing seemed untorn. The karks hadn’t gotten very far.

  Izzy wiggled the arm and watched it wobble back and forth. “Rigor hasn’t set in. This is only a couple hours old.”

  “Maya, Laramie. Fan out. Look for any others.” Wyatt loosened his Vector strap and knelt next to Izzy. “How did he die?”

  “Hard to tell. Not exposure. There’s no sunburn.”

  “Disease?”

  Izzy frowned at the mangled hands and face. “I don’t think so. The scavengers would stay away.” He pulled out his utility knife and cut off the buttons of the boy’s shirt. Translucent, splotchy skin stretched over gaunt ribs.

  “Starved to death. These are all signs of malnutrition.”

  That was twice now. Starvation was something Wyatt saw all too often on deep-space rescue missions. But here? He thought back to the colonists holed up in Town Hall, the corpse of the woman who had starved surrounded by ration boxes. “This doesn’t make sense. There’s food in the other buildings.”

  A circle of karks let out angry croaks from above.

  “LT, there’s another one over here,” Laramie said.

  Wyatt walked to the other side of the roundabout. Laramie was examining the remains of a carcass slumped forward against a yield sign.

  “Pecked real good by the beasties. Looks like she came from over there. See the blood trail?” She pointed at a thin, darkened stain that extended around the corner.

  “That’s fresh, too,” Wyatt said. “Come on. Maybe there are survivors.”

  The four troopers followed the blood. The road here was mostly dirt, and the stain became difficult to follow in the failing light. A block later and Wyatt lost sight of it. He cursed at leaving his CORE helmet behind.

  “Maya, can you pick up that blood trail with your optics?”

  The sergeant scanned the street. She pointed at a large, one-story structure comprised of multiple cargo containers sandwiched together. Double doors mounted in one of the walls formed the entrance. “It goes off into that doorway over there.”

  Wyatt squinted at the unusual layout. Instead of being stacked, the containers were laid out side by side and seemed like they were newer models than those they had found around Town Hall. “Laramie, I thought you said we were in the burbs. What sort of building is that?”

  “A big one.”

  “Didn’t mean that.”

  “It’s all I got, LT.”

  “Okay. Spread out and move up. Let’s see if there are any survivors.”

  They arranged themselves into a skirmish line and approached the building. Wyatt noted the dark interior behind the wide-open entry and stopped to listen. He didn’t hear anything, and wondered if they would find another massacre like the inside of the Town Hall.

  He placed a foot inside the doorway and crossed the threshold. The air turned warm and humid, stiffening the hairs on the back of his neck.

  10

  A locker room. That’s what it smelled like to Wyatt. Dank sweat, with a hint of body odor.

  He switched on his Vec
tor’s tactical flashlight again. Izzy and Laramie did the same, leaving Maya to scan with infrared using her helmet. Tables and chairs sat empty in the room, their tops strewn with clothing and junk. Closed storage lockers lined the walls. The only exit was a doorway to an adjoining area that had been cut out of the original container wall, its hatch hanging half-closed on its hinges. The air hung heavily around them, with no ventilation of any kind to disturb the silence.

  “Spread out. Find the blood trail.”

  Flashlight beams swept carefully over the furniture. Wyatt walked slowly around the corner of one table and noticed an old-fashioned tablet computer discarded on top. He tapped the screen only to find it had run out of power.

  “Lieutenant, over here,” Maya said.

  He made his way over to the hatch and shined his light on the deck where Maya pointed.

  “The trail goes into this other room.”

  “Laramie, Izzy, stack up on me,” he said. “Maya, on my mark, pull the hatch open. Slowly.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  “Ready? Mark.”

  The hinges made no sound, which Wyatt found somehow more disturbing than if they had announced their presence. He wasn’t claustrophobic—RESIT troopers couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t last past their first spacecraft boarding—but still a shiver went down his spine. The whole building felt like a tomb.

  He entered the next room, which was really just the inside of an adjacent cargo container. A sweep of his flashlight revealed more storage lockers. Two parallel benches sat in the middle of the area. A bulkhead acted as a sort of partition that obscured the left side of the room, but Wyatt thought he saw a shower head mounted to the wall.

  “I think this is some kind of rec center. Common area back there, now a locker room.”

  “That would explain the wonderful aroma,” Laramie said.

  He found the blood trail and saw that it wound its way around the bulkhead. He gestured to Izzy to move wide, then carefully stepped around the benches until he was next to the opening. He peeked around the corner. The beam from his flashlight illuminated a large shower room.